The Federal Minimum Wage is Currently a Poverty Wage

Posted at https://www.epi.org/publication/the-erosion-of-the-federal-minimum-wage-has-increased-poverty-especially-for-black-and-hispanic-families/

Higher wages were a key plank of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign to reduce poverty. But over the last five decades the real value of the minimum wage—a key tool in the fight against poverty—has steadily eroded, according to a new Economic Snapshot by EPI’s Ben Zipperer. By comparing full-time minimum wage incomes with poverty thresholds for different family sizes, Zipperer shows that a single parent of one child would be consigned to poverty if that parent earned the federal minimum wage. Zipperer also finds that had the federal minimum wage been raised to keep up with inflation since 1968, nearly 3.3 million fewer African Americans and Hispanics would be in poverty today. Read the Snapshot »